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The Stoics held that the only thing good in itself is virtue — an excellent character — and the only genuine evil is its opposite. Everything else people chase or dread, from health and wealth to reputation, comfort, and life itself, they called "indifferents." Not indifferent in the sense of not mattering at all, but indifferent to the single question that decides a good life: whether you are a good person. Most of these they ranked as "preferred" (health over sickness, wealth over poverty) and their opposites as "dispreferred," so a Stoic sensibly reaches for the doctor and the paycheck. But none of them can make you good, and their loss cannot make you bad.
The reasoning is worth following. A thing that is truly good, the Stoics argued, ought to benefit whoever holds it, always, and never harm them. Yet money ruins some people and rescues others; strength serves a just man and a tyrant alike; even health can be poured into cruelty. Only the virtues — practical wisdom, justice, courage, and self-command — are good in every hand and every circumstance. They cannot be turned to harm, and no one can confiscate them. Seneca, one of the wealthiest men in Rome, insisted that he held his fortune loosely precisely because he knew it was not the good; Epictetus, who owned almost nothing, was no poorer in the only currency that finally counted.
This is the hinge the whole of Stoicism turns on. If character is the only good, then a good life is always within reach — in a hospital bed or a prison cell as fully as in a palace — because its raw material, your own choices, is never taken away. It relocates the entire project of a happy life from the outside, where luck rules, to the inside, where you rule.
That is also why the Stoics could face exile, poverty, and death with such steadiness. They had already decided that these things, painful as they are, could not reach the part of them that mattered. To live by this principle is to keep asking, under every gain and every loss, one steadying question: has my character held? If it has, the day was not wasted, whatever else it took.